The bit at the end starting with agriculture is much smaller relative to human history. Homo Sapiens attained our present taxonomy about 350,000-500,000 years ago. Agriculture, armies, and empires as we now know them all started around 10,000 years ago.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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To be fair, quite a bit has changed since then (in terms of technological progress)
Actually, no.
Evolution does not work that way. We are still apes.
I meant in terms of technological progression, we have become a lot more interdependent with people across the world.
Still doesn’t represent human nature which is that of apes who have convinced themselves they are not apes
True
lmao
People will post this as if tribal conflicts over land and resources just didn't exist during that time period.
The truth is that people have always been shitty.
Capitalism isn't about conflicts over land and resources though? It's about the exploitation of a majority of workers by a minority class of capitalist owners.
In order to solve "tribal conflicts over land and resources" you need to eliminate the concept of tribes altogether, or their modern equivalent, nations/states. That's why most communists happen to be globalists too, as in "world communism is the goal".
Conflicts over land ownership didn't start until the Reconquista just before the modern era. Prior to that the idea that people privately could own land didn't exist. This idea was very helpful for colonization and it is not natural.
??? People have been fighting over land for as long as recorded history, and probably for longer. I might be misunderstanding your comment, because I don't see how you can say that there were no conflicts over land ownership until the Reconquista. Or was the Roman Empire built through a series of peaceful agreements? And private land ownership absolutely existed. Ruling classes have held private estates for millennia. Again, please let me know if I've just completely missed your point.
There is a major difference between conquering people and claiming the places they reside as part of empire versus drawing lines on a map and claiming to legally own the land itself.
When the Romans were conquering their empire in Europe, they weren't claiming land and claiming that those who resided on that land were now subject to the Roman Empire. This is however literally what Spain did during the Reconquista and what the conquistadors did in the Americas afterward. It's also how these thigs tend to go today.
The Romans, like the Aztecs, conquered groups of people and forced them to be subjects. The land they were on was less important than the people themselves being subjugated to the hegemon. If a subject city's population decided to abandon it and establish their city elsewhere within Rome's martial reach, the Romans would keep the people rather than the useless unoccupied land.
Feudal estates and fiefdoms are a kind of proto land ownership but even this was distinct to how we would consider it today. Claims were much more vague and impossible to enforce without the cartography tools we have now. Again, they were claiming ownership of the nation as a people, not a nation defined by borders and acreage.
Of course there was plenty of disagreement as to which hegemon runs which settlement. The disagreement was not that two governments had a legal claim to the same piece of defined land, but things like "God chose me to rule whatever I can reach, and I can reach you" or simply "I can beat you in war, so these people are mine."
People "owned" their homes and used whatever land around it to farm, but not as in they had a legal claim to the whole piece of property and a franchise to do with that landed property as they pleased. They owned it because they resided there and could keep up what they were using. Wealthier people had more people to manage more territory in their behalf, but even this was more about the subjects than the land they lived on, which was understood to be incidental compared to how we would see it today. Unoccupied, unused land miles away from where anyone lived was not being fought over. Wherever they lived domination of people was fought for.
Understanding this helped me understand how the Romans would tell a Germanic tribe “hey sure we’ve got some open land over in Aquitaine, just settle there and pay us taxes”. Thinking of it terms of borders as lines on a map just left me more confused.
Hunter-gatherers have a fundamentally different connection to land than we do. It highly depends on the materialmode of production how "shitty" people are (immediate return hunter gatherers are very egalitarian - pastoralists are usually very patriarchal.